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Flatulent fish net Ig Nobel award

Helen Pilcher

Prize winning discovery: farts may help herring communicate in the dark.

Farting may be a source of schoolboy humour, but it's a matter of life and death for some fish. So say researchers who have just scooped the Biology Ig Nobel award for their discovery that herring may use flatulence as a danger signal.

The Ig Nobel prizes, which are a foil to the Nobel Prizes due to be announced next week, are designed to reward research that makes people laugh, then think. They were presented last night at Harvard University, Massachusetts, in front of a raucous audience.

Winner Robert Batty from the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban and his colleagues, became intrigued by fish farts when they were monitoring captive herring and noticed them breaking wind. "We heard these rasping noises at night," recalls Batty. There were tiny gas bubbles coming from the fish's behinds, he adds.

The fish gulp air from the surface and store it in their swim bladder, before releasing it from a duct in their anus. The noises probably help fish to communicate in the dark, suggests Batty, who reported the results last year in Biology Letters1.

“We heard these rasping noises at night. They sounded like high-pitched raspberries.”

Fish at the front of a shoal may fart to direct other members in a particular direction, helping to keep the school together and away from predators. The sounds are not made during the day, when the fish use visual information instead.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/full/news040927-19.html